Microsoft posts video of customers criticizing OpenOffice

Microsoft has posted a video in which it shows 15 of its customers attacking …

Instead of simply listing what it believes to be the advantages of Microsoft Office over the open source OpenOffice.org productivity suite, Microsoft has compiled comments from 15 customers who switched to Office after evaluating OpenOffice. The result: this video recently posted to the company's officevideos YouTube channel, which we've embedded below. A few hours after this story was published, Microsoft set the video as "private," meaning it can no longer be viewed by the public. We found it hosted on Microsoft.com, however, so if you have Silverlight, go watch it there. After we found the Silverlight version, Microsoft set the YouTube video back to public:

Microsoft's latest attack on OpenOffice

The three minute video is well constructed, though it has no pretense of objectivity; Microsoft is of course only choosing quotes from customers who have switched back to its productivity suite. The video has 17 quotes in total, 14 of which complain about how OpenOffice leads to higher long-term costs, poor interoperability, lower productivity, decreased efficiency, and overall frustration (students, it can even affect your grades). The remaining three quotes describe the relief of switching back to Microsoft Office.

Though they flash past quickly, every quote is attributed to an individual, not to the software giant. After doing a little digging, we found that these quotes are actually from case studies and press articles from the last four years, most of which are hosted on Microsoft.com. (Links to these are below.)

Has your company tried OpenOffice and Office? If so, how did your own experience measure up to the complaints provided here?

Well, it all really depends what you focus on. Regular people? OO is just fine. For me, I hate Calc both in its poor shortcuts, weird usability issues (I hit delete on a cell, chill out and remove the damn text/number), and its really poor chart options.

I don't understand this OOo hate. OO is fine, I use it for the little needs I have since 2001 or so, and it's *good enough*. Nothing great, but definitely good enough. And it opens those f**** word or excel documents people insist on sending to me.

wazooxx if you don't spend your day using Office apps, you wouldn't get the OOo hate. It's *painful* to use for anything remotely complex, and while the excuse "everyone uses office" might be self-fulfilling prophecy, it's still true. Nobody uses OOo and opening MS Office files with it is a very trying experience.

I could be one of the users who hates OO.o. Just because something is open source doesn't make it superior in any way, and in the case of Open Office, it's actually too clunky and problematic to be used. People that do a lot of margin and formatting stuff know exactly what I mean.

If you want cheap or free, use the free MS Office Online suite, and when you want some more power, then you get the full version. Both are better than Open Office.

I use OpenOffice at home, MS Office at work. OpenOffice works, but MS Office is definitely nicer. But the question is, is it worth the cost? I would suspect for most companies, it certainly is worth it.

Calc is slow but the rest of OO.org seems to work just fine. We use a mix here and hadn't upgraded any of our Office users to the latest. We got in some DocX files and had to use OpenOffice to see them.

I do think Office is better then OO.org for the most part. But not worth the cost to be honest.And more and more we are using Google docs at my office.

I switched my entire company to Ubuntu and OpenOffice by force. Staff were bitching and moaning to me for about 10 days. Surprised that nobody was complaining after this time, I asked why... the response I got was "Oh, it works the same."

Basically, OO.org is different, and can be hard to use. But it is mostly a familiarity issue, and for 95% of users, it is good enough.

Personally the MS Office ribbon interface was a complete disaster for experienced users, such as myself and coworkers. I imagine it is easier for people new to Office. All two of them? No friggin' way are we switching at work. We need perfect low-hassle document exchange and the world uses MS Office, or at least everyone who counts to us. Myself and some IT people have used OO.

I used it for abiout a year at home before I decided to upgrade my MS Office. It was completely functional for typical tasks though the interface felt a bit plain. But when I saw a $75 Home edition upgrade for MS Office 2007 I jumped on it.

I use OpenOffice at home, MS Office at work. OpenOffice works, but MS Office is definitely nicer. But the question is, is it worth the cost? I would suspect for most companies, it certainly is worth it.

Exactly. For home use, though, OpenOffice works fine for me. I use it all day long (home office) and it does pretty much everything I need. And as for people complaining about poor document compatibility, I can't say I've seen that for Word documents (what I receive from coworkers) at the least. Equations, tables, formatting, nothing has given any trouble.

The company is still on Office 2003, though, so I don't have any experience yet in trying to work with .docx files.

I *do* hate Microsoft with a passion, and I use OpenOffice. It's fine for my needs, but if I had to use it for anything complex I'd probably use Microsoft Office. OO is lacking some features, and I usually have to fix a couple of minor formatting issues on documents before printing them on an Office-equipped computer.

That said, this advert does nothing to make me like Microsoft. What's with the knives, and the shadows of soldiers saluting in the background? Not part of your argument, you fucks. Leave them out.

For me at home MS Office is over-kill, but I use it because I'm used to it from work. There is no way I could do what I do at work with anything other than MS Office though. I used OO at home for a very short period of time, and just hated it.

I use Open Office at home and have never used it for anything other than basic spreadsheets and basic letter writing tasks and it has never given me any problems. I have written a couple of short macros and prefer writing them it OO.O rather than Excel because I more use to the Javascript style syntax although overall I would say MS office is better.

I think that moving to a open source based service would be difficult not because of any inherit problem with the software. But most users are too stuck in their was to learn anything new, we have a new IT system at work and people are slagging it off no end because it is so different to the system that it's replaced. Also most of the IT support staff are Microsoft trained and don't know a lot about computers other than how to fix windows, mostly through re imaging.

At my last job the IT support staff would tell you over the phone that they knew nothing about computers, although I guessing that behind the scenes were some much better IT mangers who knew their stuff. At my new job one of the IT support workers couldn't work out how to re orientate the screen after some one had accidental rotated it the screen on to its side and another didn't know how to import e-mail groups in outlook.

Again these people are very junior IT support staff but they would not be useful if my company decided to move to OO.O let alone a new OS like Ubuntu with out a ton of training which would cost a boat load of cash. So I'm not surprised that these people had problems.

It real annoys me that IT mangers don't know where to go to get support for open source software.

Also students loosing marks for handing in work formatted in open office that's just crazy.

I tried to like OpenOffice, it just really isn't that good. It's nice in a pinch if you just need a way to open a spreadsheet or Word document on occasion, but it's slow, and the interface feels really outdated.

Like Microsoft or not (I personally have no problem with them), Microsoft Office is really, really good. And it should be, they've had how many versions now?

The thing that annoys me is people using the programs in ways they aren't intended for, and getting annoyed with them - e.g. using PowerPoint as a document publishing solution.

We switched back after about a year. It actually manages to be worse than MS Office, which is hard to believe - but true.

It's pretty easy to believe, it's trying to be an office clone. And it's very difficult to replicate the look and feel of a program while writing it from scratch.

http://why.openoffice.org/images/writer-big.png - that's the screenshot they currently have for Writer. It even looks like a bad version of Word 2003, but they stuffed everything in there Word had at the time. And they didn't mirror it perfectly, it's flawed, so it's harder to use.

They should have always reinvented themselves, but never did. So every time Microsoft bothers improving something, OOo looks left behind. Google on the other hand went with simplicity, I quite like using Google Docs to write something then Word to format it. They took more of a basic approach to excel and focused a lot on using it for forms and a simple backend database to use with google apps, which wasn't a bad idea. Doesn't replicate macros and Excels functionality, it does things in a more web-centric manner, which is nice (because no one has ever really come close to Excel at what it does). Apple made Keynote, which is nicer than Powerpoint, while OOo cloned it, flaws and all (and then some). There's plenty of web-based Powerpoint software around that does interesting things too, free and slightly different.

All OOo really has going for it is "free". Except if it manages to waste more than 5 hours of my work time, it's blown that advantage way out of the water. And Microsoft have cheap home versions that make the frustration of OOo not worth it. They really didn't pick their market, at all, and went straight for being a free clone. Could you imagine if Firefox competed by being an IE clone?

I would never pay for MS Office. I honestly think they're just over-charging for it just to fund their less happy product lines. Plus, in times, it can be a real pain with some annoying bugs, especially regarding styles. So I'm using OOo on a daily basis, it being free.

However, I've always found OOo to be even worse than MSOffice... There are even more minor annoyances. So I only recommend it for honest people who have no money to waste on Microsoft and don't pirate software. But it's a hard thing to do...

Sorry for them, I'd so much like a free productivity suite, like in free speech and like in hassle-free.

There's no way our users would adjust well to OO. Especially excel. Hell, I can barely deal with it for simple entry issues. It's frustrating. And I am tempted to go back to office because I get a university discount. The biggest thing is interoperability. Everyone uses it. So it's hard to fight that, on top of having a big ol' MS contract.

But I am going to hold out for libre office on my personal machine. I had not known that Oracle was holding back development, so maybe they can pull something off. Like allowing tab+autocomplete behavior to mimic excel.

All OOo really has going for it is "free". Except if it manages to waste more than 5 hours of my work time, it's blown that advantage way out of the water. And Microsoft have cheap home versions that make the frustration of OOo not worth it. They really didn't pick their market, at all, and went straight for being a free clone. Could you imagine if Firefox competed by being an IE clone?

However, it has its quirks. The one that broke the bank for me is how it randomly loses formatting while saving RTF files.

Since I'm required to share RTF docs with others, the last thing I need is to save a document, then open it in another RTF viewer (even MS's WordPad) and see a bunch of formatting missing. Worse yet, save it in OO, close it in OO, reopen it in OO and see missing formatting, or where it randomly decided not to save the close tag for bold or italics, thus making the rest of the document bolded or italicized.

Note: This was still happening in the 2.2 line, the last version of OO I used before switching back to MS Office.

I’ve found OpenOffice to be unusable in a business setting - it’s just too unstable, so it becomes hard to get anything done. Same goes for its variants: NeoOffice, Symphony etc. I’ve used MS Office on my Macs since 1998 and haven’t yet found a good replacement.

I make a Master thesis in history and, for that, iWork is by far the best choice. I did try OpenOffice and gave it its chance, but it wasn't good enough for my needs.

Why ? I need to do well presented documents, that I either print or send by PDF, and produce nice presentations for symposiums, or conferences. Pages and Keynote easily beat OOo, and MS Office, for these tasks. Believe me, my thesis is more stylish than all those made with Word with Times New Roman. Not that it's more important than my work, but Pages being simpler to use, and less buggy (in my experience), I can afford to take some time to have something nice and do some stuff I wouldn't even have tried on Word. Writer just plain sucks for layout. Its tools aren't great and its UI is horrible, especially when compared to Pages.

Keynote... well, given the VERY positives reactions I had, it proved itself a king in its category. Powerpoint can be OK, but requires more work. OOo's Impress is a joke compared to them. No templates, very ugly effects, even if you take a lot of time it won't be nice to look at. And yes, in front of an audience, it matters.

Numbers is not as powerful as Excel, true, but I don't need its power. I do some stats, some tables, nothing really hard, so it's perfect for me and I love its UI. I'd probably say otherwise if I were doing physics. Calc is not that bad, and probably the most usable tool of OOo, when compared with Writer and Impress. However, it's not that stable nor fast for heavy work. A friend of mine used it for heavy number crunching and had to use Excel, which did in a few seconds what OOo took minutes to do.

That said, I think OOo is perfect for:

- Undergraduate/ high school student- Administrative task (do you really need Pages'layout tools to do a letter? No.)- Some personal stuff.

Its price is unbeatable too.

So, for a lot of humanities fellows on Mac, I'd go with iWork. Compatibility with MS Office is pretty good and it's tools are well adapted for our line of work (even if it lacks some stuff, like cross-references or multiple table of contents), and it's really less expensive, especially when bought with a new Mac.

On Windows, take MS Office, even as a humanities student. For a science student or a businessman, MS Office might be better. These guys might need Excel's power more than I do and absolute compatibility with Office's files.

Overwhelming costs, cantankerous installations and a broad range of formatting problems lead our staff in the Data Center away from Microsoft Office. It is logical and understandable that in an environment where business professionals are prevalent that Microsoft Office is a mainstay, however when the only co-workers around you run Slackware/CentOS (as do I) on their workstations then the allure of a platform independent office application becomes apparent.

Open Office is resource hungry make no mistake and I am not the biggest Java fan, however when looked at comparatively to Microsoft Office, Open Office is a solution that can be easily deployed and readied without concern for licensing or Operating System. Its lack of similarity to the newest iterations of Microsoft Office can cause some confusion, but given time and experience with the application, like Microsoft Office, its operation becomes second nature.

Microsoft's frequent use of subterfuge and selective public relations quotes should come as no surprise to Ars readers, and to a point, its [Microsoft's] arguments are validated. Yet when it comes to licensing, ease of deployment and universal compatibility I have yet to cross a platform as functional (albeit with limitations) as Open Office.

There are a few things it's just best to buy and get your stuffs done instead of wasting time trying to save a few bucks (or trying to be a hero) with alternatives. Office is definitely one of them. Windows is another but I realize Ars is home to many Mac fans who would disagree on this.

I work at a school where we are transitioning to openoffice.org. It's quite painless because we offer MS Office to anyone who requests it. A few people immediately want it because they don't want to try anything new or because they have a legitimate reason to use MS Office. But overall it's fine and most people are more concerned about teaching than what software they use. Any teacher who gives a bad grade because the student didn't use MS Office should be ashamed (My school serves low income students who often don't have the choice to buy it).

Our netbooks run Linux so they only have oo.o (Yes I know wine runs Office, try running it with a multi user environment). Only students use the netbooks and they don't seem to mind, many of them use it at home. There are some things MS Office does better but I didn't see them in the video, instead just more open source is the boogie man.

We posed the transition as we need to switch to either a new version of MS or use this. oo.o which would save money and is more familiar to the Office 2003 user.

I used Star Office before it was bought by Sun. I used OpenOffice for years when I hated Microsoft. I still try OpenOffice every now and then. Mostly on Fedora but I hate it. I would probably use Fedora as my primary OS if I could use MS Office on it. Office makes working on documents and spreadsheets a pleasure. I cannot describe how painful it is not to have the ribbon. I keep hoping the KOffice will mature. But every time I try it take 5 minutes to realise it is still really bad.